Inventor Drawing, Insert a PDF as a View

[elizabeth.garr]

I have vendor design responsibility items that have a vendor print.  The vendor print is generally in a PDF format.  We take the vendor print and "picture frame" it within our title block border.

Unfortunately we cannot insert a PDF.  I would like to instead of selecting an IPT, IAM, or IPN as a view file I would like to select a vendor PDF.

Our current work around is detailed below.

It is sometimes necessary to add a PDF​ as a print in instances where the vendor controls the design of a component.  This is preferable to re-creating the vendor's print as inadvertent mistakes can be made.

Within Inventor edit the drawing sheet to be Portrait or Landscape to match the orientation of the desired PDF.

From the Manage Tab, Insert category, select "Insert Object"

From within the Insert Object dialog box select "Create New" and "Microsoft Word Document" as the Object Type.

After selecting "OK" a MS Word document opens.

At this point it is recommended to have the desired PDF open on the computer.

From within the MS Word document on the Insert tab select the Screenshot (down arrow)

With the Screen Clip active select the desired PDF in the screen clip bounding box

The PDF now exists within the MS Word document

From within Inventor a boundary box now appears.  [Note that the boundary box is often not the same aspect ratio as what was selected from within MS Word.]

Place the box within the drawing.

After the image is placed onto the Inventor drawing the MS Word document can be closed without saving (it is not a linked reference).

Using the resize pick points update the image to closely match the aspect ratio of the PDF/clipped MS Word document

If a solid model for the item exists it should be placed on the drawing face.

[elizabeth.garr]

Parker Hannifin submission

[dvsmiller9]

Our workaround: Save PDFs to a graphics format from Acrobat. Just be sure to save at a high enough resolution.  We use 1200ppi.  PNGs typically work well in Inventor 2015 and the resulting file size is not too large (I inserted a 300k PNG file and the resulting IDW is about 700k with two sheets with titleblocks).  Then we use Insert Object on the drawing page.  It can also be scaled.

I agree that inserting the PDF directly would be preferable.

[jletcher]

OK I may be misunderstanding.

I can insert PDF as long as it is one page it will fail on a pdf that has more then one page.

So what I do is if it has more then one sheet I open PDF print to pdf the one sheet I want. Now if there are 3 pages and I need all  I have to print to PDF every page to it's own PDF.

Hope this helps

[scottmoyse]

yeah I have also inserted single page pdf's often into idw's

[AshNorman]

I can insert a PDF as an object OK but the resolution seems limited so they aren't scalable to the point you can read the text.

This is the same for linked and embedded pdfs